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It was an impossibly pristine Sunday afternoon. There was maybe one cloud in the sky. Even God was Jet-Skiing on a creek somewhere, slowly, against the current, with the branches of overhanging cottonwoods providing placid shade for him. But my vacationing mother, age 69, was sitting on my sofa, for the third day in a row, eyes seared by the laptop she had been staring at since noon.

She arrived in New York on a Friday (this all happened a couple of years ago), ostensibly to visit my son. Soon after he went to bed, my mother asked, innocently enough, if I would set her up with my laptop and the online solitaire game she enjoys. Only it’s not called solitaire — that would be too easy; they call it Knuckles or Tahoe Monte or something. I couldn’t find it. I did land on a bunch of asinine Web sites that asked you to pay for the privilege of playing their solitaire game. But I do not pay for online solitaire, not even for my mother. So I showed her a different, free Internet game: Collapse.

It’s a simple game, really. No crummy deck of cards. No role-playing. No Italian plumbers who resemble the hirsute former Major League Baseball star Davey Lopes meandering through tunnels. No giant wharf rats, wearing kilts, wielding machetes, looking to knock off other rats lurking in the bowels of an old penicillin factory. O.K., I made up that last game.

No, Collapse merely consists of little colored tiles, and your objective is to a) swiftly delete them before they pile too high and b) gently euthanize your free time doing so. I once spent a six-month period coming to work, playing Collapse and berating anyone who inquired about when, precisely, I’d be doing my real job. I’ve never done cocaine (unless someone else was paying for it), but this game has the wildly addictive properties that I imagine are common in illegal stimulants. I should have remembered this before inviting a loved one to try it.

Mom: Mmhrmmmmm. Hrm. (Awkward pause lasting for 91 minutes.) O.K., I’m on Level 4. What do I do with these little bombs that show up? Oh … shoot! One more time!

Photo

Credit
Holly Wales

To be fair, my mom was overjoyed visiting my boy. And sure, we took a ride on a taxi boat. And we saw a teenage choir outdoors. Later that evening Mom gave my son a bath, and then she played more Collapse.

Instead of becoming hostile, though, I coached her by playing a few rounds myself, spacing them out so I wouldn’t get hooked again. Then I took a nap. The fact that she was occupied with the game actually made me happy, because I don’t necessarily like doing, well, much of anything anyway.

In the middle of my mom’s visit, however, I had to leave for a job out of town. Since I wasn’t a video game, my mom was not particularly sad to see me leave, but I also had to take my laptop with me. As I said my goodbyes, I saw a little shiver in her chin. It was about the laptop, and that was disappointing.

After my flight, I turned on my cellphone. There was a message from my wife. It seems they had rummaged around our storage space and booted up her old computer. I could hear a child howling in the background, footsteps, then my wife whispering tersely, “Get me the URL to that game for your mom.” I recognized the itch. In a weird way, I respected it. I forked over the URL. Two days later, my wife called again. They had been out to dinner, then shopping.

“What are you doing now?”

“Well,” she sighed in her best, coached-by-a-couples-counselor voice, “your mom’s playing that game.”

Eventually, Mom flew home — without our old laptop. I called her later to see how she was handling things cold turkey; I suspected she wouldn’t be able to find Collapse on the Internet by herself. “What?” she said when I inquired about the game. Now that she was home, she seemed barely able to recall her addiction. I was relieved — we could all move forward. And we did. Even when Mom got a new computer, she just went back to playing simple card games.

Then my wife and I had another kid, and a few weeks ago Mom returned to help us wrestle with the children. A few hours after she arrived, when the kids were both asleep, she plopped down on the sofa and eyed my laptop, enthusiastically. Pretty soon it was on her lap. “So. . . . Do you think you could set me up with that one game again?” she asked.

Jeff Johnson is a writer at BBH, an ad agency. He has written for Jane, Vice, ESPN Magazine, Vogue and McSweeney’s.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page MM102 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Online Mainline. Today's Paper|Subscribe